Conventionally, team members working on one or more projects within a company may get together in a huddle or micromeeting on a regular basis to share information, discuss topics, evaluate performance, identify issues, and/or solve problems collaboratively. Since the introduction of the huddle, whiteboards have acted as the traditional tool for storing all information collected during an active huddle session. However, one drawback of the current huddle methodology is that it may not be possible for all participants in a meeting to be in the same physical location at the same time.
Alternatives to overcome the challenge of gathering team members who may be at different locations for a huddle, may include the use of one or more collaboration tools such as conference phone calls, video conferences, Internet relay chat (IRC), email, and instant messaging, among others. Nevertheless, the whiteboard is still the most commonly used tool during huddles, because the aforementioned collaboration tools are generic ways to connect people and may not offer a consistent way to realize the benefits of the team huddle. As a result, all team members must be physically located in the same room in order to be fully engaged in the huddle session.
Conventional approaches to meetings amongst remote users fail address all of the deficiencies of the conventional collaboration tools. A web meeting may allow a user to share a computer desktop with another user in a remote location. But the user must select which application should be presented on the computer desktop, so there is no ability to present a page that has information from multiple sub-applications that are dynamically updated. Further, the user cannot include annotations overlaid on the page that are simultaneously presented to the remote user and also stored with that particular page such that the particular page can be retrieved at a later date along with those annotations.
Moreover, conventional extranets are capable of sharing information from a common source, but these extranets do not offer real-time collaboration through real-time updates and simultaneous displays to other users. Further, these conventional extranets do not utilize sub-applications that dynamically display data associated with users simultaneously accessing the extranet. Conventional computer solutions do not offer the desired collaboration, real-time updating, dynamic presentation of data, and linking of additional content to the displayed data.
Therefore, there is a need for systems and methods which may enable remote huddle collaboration between team members of a given project that may overcome these and other drawbacks.